Week in Pictures

After taking a whole two weeks off from making bread, I couldn’t help myself and tried out another recipe from my How to Make Bread cookbook, this one being an olive & herb bread. Now I’m actually not one of those folks who like the loaves with huge pieces of food mixed up in them (and I do not like olives, even in vodka) so I modified it by mincing the olives so it would just add the saltiness and moisture to the bread, and so that with the herbs de provence (which I had a batch pre-made as we’d used it for a meat curing project a while back, yay!) was DELISH. FYI, for those who are curious, the only difference between this and a standard loaf is 1/3 cup minced olives mixed with 1 1/2 teaspoons of herbs, added in while kneading. So, so good y’all.

So while my back and our budget cannot afford a traditional gym membership or yoga classes, I decided to invest in a bike trainer instead. What is this, you might ask? Well basically it turns your bike into a stationary bicycle, and is freakin’ awesome. You just hook your back wheel up to this thingamajig and hop on, it’s great. Don’t ask me the physics of why the front wheel doesn’t turn while doing this (Dan tried, my mind failed) but all I can say is that when the weather is cold and/or rainy and I am not feeling badass enough to take my bike out, this is a great investment. Along with that, it’s a way more efficient use of my time while I’m doing my own sort of in-home PT because it’s literally sitting in the living room so I can just hop on and pedal for a few minutes until the irritation begins and then just hop off, not stuck anywhere going damn, I’m in pain, how do I muscle it back home. I gotta persevere in this injury recovery as I sure do miss my life on two wheels, folks…

This month’s adoption planning was both free and VERY expensive. The bouncer to the left was one that a neighbor was offering up for free on Nextdoor . We don’t want to accumulate a bunch of crap but I did want to find one of these for what I like to call ‘temporary place to lay the baby when we’re not carrying it around’ – i.e., set this on the kitchen table with the kid strapped in so they can hang out in the same room while we’re cooking, and honestly because so many blogs and forums I’ve read have parents saying their kid slept in this or the carseat more than anything else. Free is a very good price. The other thing we did was update our adoption profile book. I’d been begging the agency director to get me feedback on our original book and so finally she got some which were to make it “more playful” and to put our wedding picture on the front, so basically I found this ocean-y background and a more curvy font, along with adding some new pictures (while removing the picture of our Ruby since she passed away in November), and she loved it. But dang, another $500 for 30 books made me really nauseous as it’s not the time to be doing that. We’d taken the new book to FedEx/Kinko’s to try to save some $$ and they actually said “unless you can provide copyright permissions all of the photos in here we can’t duplicate them” and the only book they could do was a cheap-ass spiral which the agency would not accept. So we had to stick with Mixbook. Fuck fuck fuck. So all I can say is, I really hope this is the last order of books and that our birth mum is one of the next 30 readers, as we’ve now spent just under $2,000 on profile books. Whew…

Betty giving me the stank eye before dunking her entire head in the tub for a quick wash-up. They are not happy with their temporary limited space in the back yard but I on the other hand am VERY happy to see spring just around the corner in my garden, tulips unfettered by duck trauma 🙂

And speaking of spring being just around the corner! Our huge California Lilac bush is beginning to bloom, attracting the mason bees and more…it makes me sad for the honeybees we lost over winter, but super excited for the new bees we’ll be bringing home in a couple months!

One thought on “Week in Pictures”

I have one of those wind trainers for my bike too. Bought it when I was trying to get back into shape after the birth of our first child. It is in our basement and I do use it still but not as often as I should.